Josef Bican

12:01AM GMT 26 Dec 2001

JOSEF BICAN, who has died aged 88, played centre-forward for the brilliant Austrian football team of the 1930s and was a most prolific goalscorer.

In January the International Federation of Football Historians and Statisticians awarded Bican the "Golden Ball" as the greatest goalscorer of the last century. The award was judged by the number of times a player had been top scorer in his domestic league

. Bican managed this feat 12 times, once more than the Brazilians Pele and Romario: in total, he succeeded in scoring 649 times in his career.

The award recognised the 229 goals he scored during the Second World War, which had previously been excluded since Czechoslovakia was not independent at the time.

When the IFFHS had failed to count his wartime goals for a previous award, Bican boycotted the ceremony, claiming they had "stolen" his goals. Instead, he drank tea from a thermos flask with his wife in their hotel room.

Josef Bican was born in Vienna on September 25 1913 to a poor Czech family. He spent most of his childhood playing street football with a rolled-up sock, which gave him superb technique and a knack for improvisation.

Powerfully built, Bican could cover 100 metres in 10.8 seconds - but what distinguished him was his love of scoring goals, whether tap-ins or 30-metre volleys. His goals won him Austrian championship medals from 1934 to 1937, the first two titles with Rapid Vienna, the others with local rivals Admira.

Bican was by then a regular in the Austrian side, which under the innovative coaching of Hugo Meisl had become known as the "Wunderteam". It was a golden age for football in Central Europe, which provided three of the four semi-finalists at the 1934 World Cup in Italy.

The Austrians faced the hosts in the semi-final and were warned that the Swedish referee, Ivan Eklind, had dined with Mussolini.

When the Austrian goalkeeper caught the ball three metres out of his goal only to be bundled over the line by the Italian forwards, Eklind allowed the goal. Bican claimed the referee later headed one of his crosses to an Italian. Mussolini approved, and Eklind took charge of the final where Italy beat Czechoslovakia, amid further refereeing controversy.

Bican scored 14 goals in 19 games for Austria but never again appeared in the World Cup. Four years later he moved to Czechoslovakia ahead of the Anschluss, only for the Nazis to follow him soon afterwards.

He won the Mitropa Cup, the forerunner of the Champions' League with Slavia Prague and applied for Czechoslovak citizenship; but the request was not processed in time and he refused the Nazis' demand that he represent Germany.

Bican led Slavia to four successive league titles during the war and afterwards was approached by Juventus. Had he gone, he might now be as famous as Ferenc Puskas - but Bican declined, fearing Italy would become communist. When the communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, his chance to play abroad had gone.

Bican scored 57 goals in the 1953-54 season, his highest total, and retired a year later as a national hero.

The communist government wanted to use Bican as a propaganda weapon. When he refused to be a puppet, the Czechoslovak authorities put it about that Bican was a bourgeois Viennese, ignoring his plea that his origins were humble. His cause was not helped by the fact that Slavia Prague was traditionally the favourite club of the middle-class.

He was made to work as a labourer at Prague's Holesovice railway station and drifted into obscurity and poverty. But his standing grew once again after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which overthrew the communists, and this year he was given the Freedom of Prague.

Always a gentleman, Bican disapproved of the boorish behaviour of today's players and the adulation of what he considered mediocre talents. But he died content that his place in the game had been finally recognised.